It’s perhaps better known for providing the architecture for the question answering system IBM Watson.

What is BlueMix?

BlueMix is IBM’s new Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering, built on top of Cloud Foundry to provide a cloud development platform.

It’s in open beta at the moment, so you can sign up and have a play.

I’ve never used BlueMix before, or Cloud Foundry for that matter, so this was a chance for me to write my first app for it.

A UIMA “Hello World” for BlueMix

I’ve written a small sample to show how UIMA and BlueMix can work together. It provides a REST API that you can submit text to, and get back a JSON response with some attributes found in the text (long words, capitalised words, and strings that look like email addresses).

The “analytics” that the app is doing is trivial at best, but this is just a Hello World. For now my aim isn’t to produce a useful analytics solution, but to walk through the configuration needed to define a UIMA analytics pipeline, wrap it in a REST API using Wink, and deploy it as a BlueMix application.

When I get a chance, I’ll write a follow-up post on making something more useful.

Each uses a regular expression to find things to annotate in the text. This isn’t intended to be an indication that this is how things should be done, just that it makes for a simple and stateless demonstration without any additional dependencies.

The simplest is the regex used to find capitalised words in WordCaseAnnotator and the most complex is the ridiculously painful one used to find email addresses in EmailAnnotator.

Like I said, it’s very simple. The Java itself isn’t particularly complex. My reason for sharing it was to provide a boilerplate config for defining a UIMA analytics pipeline, wrapping it in a REST API, and deploying it to BlueMix.

Once you’ve got that working, you can do text analytics in BlueMix as complex as whatever you can dream up for your annotators.

When I get time, I’ll write a follow-up post sharing what that could look like.